


Secret Piano

by BrokeTheLights



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Embarrassed Dib, Frustrated Zim, How does one describe instruments?, It's not ZaDr but if you think that way then I guess?, Music, Musical Dib, Uninterested Tallest, dark rooms, music magic, overwhelming feelings, piano playing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 14:39:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15665226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrokeTheLights/pseuds/BrokeTheLights
Summary: It's been two months, and Zim just notices that he hasn't seen Dib in the cafeteria for that entire time. Curiosity gets the better of him, and he finds the need to dive deep into what he finds Dib doing.





	Secret Piano

A pattern had started up with the boy that Zim loved to hate. He’d quietly noticed it one lunch at school, when Dib hadn’t shown up to the cafeteria for a two months.

  It was strange for the stink-beast with weird hair to mess up his schedule, though he did do it on occasion. Almost every time, however, Zim had seen him go back to his usual life patterns. This time, the change stuck, and Zim became suspicious of the human boy.

  Bored of not seeing his rival in his usual spot in the cafeteria and tired of pretending to eat when no one was watching, Zim decided to search the rest of the school. He was shocked to find that, when he stepped out of the cafeteria, almost no one was in the hallways or within other classrooms. Practically the entire school, during lunches, sat inside the huge school meal room. How had he not thought of doing more things at lunch before, when even more people wouldn’t notice?

  Zim shook his head. Whatever, he had resolved to step out of the human eating chamber to find where his enemy had gone. He’d have to start planning things in the hallways later, when the black-haired human smeet was found again.

  Zim started to pick up on some faint sounds after he’d wandered down a couple hallways, sounds that seemed almost… beautiful. They were in specific patterns, and each sound kept in time with the last, like they were being produced for the sole purpose of being nice to hear. They went from high to low, like a form of dance around one another. Zim couldn’t help but be lured by them, though he loathed to admit that something so lowly as _sounds_ could make him move onwards like an Earthly dog.

  In silence, he made his way down some more hallways. He got slightly annoyed by just how many hallways there were in the elementary school he was in, though soon found where the strange sounds were coming from; a closed door off to his right, marked the ‘band room’. Zim decided that after he found the source of these sounds and got back on track to find that stupid human boy, he’d ask him what a ‘band’ was.

  After he pushed the door open ever so slightly, Zim realised that he _liked_ the sounds, and that they were giving him good feelings deep within his being, like joy and happiness. They manipulated his emotions, and immediately after he realised that, Zim tried to force the sounds not to affect him by communicating with his PAK that he was under mental attack. Unfortunately, his PAK seemed unconvinced by this, and made it clear to Zim that nothing was wrong whatsoever within any part of him. Zim frowned to himself, but was forced to deal with the fact that the sounds he processed through his hearing organs were just ones that he really, _really_ liked. He then shook his head and squinted his eyes.

  Finally focused back to what he saw, Zim noticed that the room from which the sounds came from was nearly completely dark, except for a small point of light in the centre of the room. The light seemed to come from a bendy lamp attached to and pointed behind a huge box-like object. Zim was disappointed that he couldn’t name the box, behind which he noticed the figure of a person.

  Zim recognized the person as the little bratty smeet-boy he had briefly looked for, but then he tried to process what the box-like object was. He pieced together that it seemed to be a noise box, and it produced the sounds Zim seemed to enjoy. After he squinted a little harder, he also saw that it was a deep, wooden brown. It looked to be rectangular, and faced Dib with one of the longest sides. With a glance below, Zim saw that it had four skinny wood legs that kept it up somehow. Dib seemed to be entranced by it, and was focused on something behind - or maybe in front of? - the noisy wooden structure, his body turned completely toward it, even hunched over it a little bit. Awed, Zim wanted to see what made Dib so quiet and focused, and though it might have just been his out-of-whack emotions, Zim also wanted to try and make the feel-good sounds that Dib seemed to produce.

  With some gathered up amount of courage, Zim snuck inside and, quiet as a mouse, closed the door. He wanted to see the side of the wooden noise piece that had enraptured Dib’s attention, but he also didn’t want to have Dib stop, so he stayed silent. He moved quickly and quietly from one side of the room to the other, and stayed as close to the walls as possible. Finally, Zim saw what the attached lamp was pointed at.

  Dib’s fingers danced across a surface of vertically inlaid ebony and ivory, the surface mostly flat, faced towards the ceiling. The surface that Dib touched looked to be attached to the box shape that Zim had seen from behind. The little alien saw that Dib’s fingers pressed quickly down, then released, what looked like long, rectangular buttons in time with the audio patterns he heard. The sound box, Zim figured, made noise because of whichever shade was pressed on the surface that jutted out from the box. Each ‘button’, or perhaps ‘key’, made a different, unique sound, from lower sounds on the left side to higher on the right, and through a short amount of observation, Zim saw that the ebony keys, which looked shorter in length and taller upon the surface, clashed with the ivory ones directly beside them.

  There seemed to be another protrusion from the noise box just above where Dib was pressing the keys, which appeared to be some form of tiny shelf. It held a couple papers, which Dib seemed to be staring intently at, even though his hands were the ones actually in motion. Zim squinted at the papers and saw that there was something written them. The things written on the pages looked like a mess of chicken scratch, full of horizontal lines with dots in between and upon them, and with a small amount of amusement, Zim thought they looked a lot like the Vortian written language. Zim had always considered the Vortian language unnecessarily complex, and then, looking at a human-made page of Vortian-looking symbols, Zim couldn't help the thought that his life could be a lot easier if everything were just written in Irken.

  Zim’s eyes trailed back down to Dib’s hands, and he was entranced by how quickly and gracefully Dib seemed to move his fingers upon the black and white ‘keys’. Though it was such a small movement compared to when the boy talked, they seemed to be so much more delicate and precise, almost completely out of character for what Zim perceived of Dib. The sounds he made on the wooden structure were perfect and never out of time, always right on the mark, and in the back of his mind, it sounded to Zim like Dib had been practicing for a very long time, though with no one else was any the wiser.

  Then, with a final strike upon ebony and ivory, the sounds evaporated into the air, and left behind a reverberation that carried around the room. The last dying sound made Zim feel whole and strangely happy, though he couldn’t explain why. Zim could hear Dib’s breathing as he panted, sounding out of breath from simply moving his hands around. The human then flipped the papers, and Zim was surprised to see that there was more of that Vortian-looking language. Dib, apparently, could understand it perfectly, and to Zim’s further surprise, he put his hands upon the inlaid surface again, and started to rhythmically press the keys once more.

  The sounds came back, but this time they were different. They felt sad, mournful almost, and Zim felt within his breast his own sorrows, which were brought to light by the slow, measured rhythms. It scared Zim how much these sounds affected him, even more than the last set of sounds, and yet his PAK seemed unconcerned by the things in his head, which scared him even more.

  All too soon, his eyes began to water, and Zim couldn’t stop the pricks of tears that came to his eyes, even though he internally screamed at himself for being so easily swept into emotion. Irkens shouldn’t even _have_ feelings, so why was this so powerful to him? As the sounds wrapped around him in the back of the band room, Zim silently wept, a new wave of sorrow brought forth with every light press of the keys.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity and an ocean of tears to Zim, the sounds came to an end, the reverberations leaving an empty hole in the alien’s theoretical heart, and Zim, angered, wiped dry his eyes, though his contacts popped out in the process. He planned to shove them back in, jump up, and march over to Dib to make him stop the sounds that he had at first been drawn to, but by the time he heard Dib turn his papers once again, he had only managed to put in one contact. Almost instantly, new sounds flooded the room, and Zim panicked with his second contact.

  The new sounds brought with them a sense of excitement and thrill, and Zim felt like he was in the middle of a battle with the enthusiastic boy who created the audio patterns. He felt himself tense for an imagined fight and his eyes widen in preparation. It was incredibly difficult, but Zim did his absolute best not to make a sound, even though his entire being vibrated with the energy that the new sounds brought. The patterns of the sounds swooped around him like the sword of an enemy, and it took all of Zim’s will to sit still and not cut through the sounds with a battle cry. In a normal situation, he would jump into motion, without a care for the effects of his actions, but this time, _this_ time, Zim decided he liked the things he heard, he didn’t want it to end. He had a feeling that if Dib knew he was there, he’d stop and things would go back to normal between them. Overwhelmed by the thought of _I can’t have this end yet_ , Zim found himself unable to move. That one thought alone kept him stuck in place, like a sticker in a sticker book.

  He subconsciously realised that it was foolish, what he was doing, and that he’d gone completely off his mission by allowing Dib this advantage over him, even if the boy didn’t even know he had it. He realised that it was stupid to want to feel emotions, nevermind feel them via an outside source, and that it was practically unheard of to want to keep those feelings around. He even realised that by his failure to stop Dib and destroy the thing that held so much sway over him, he was becoming inefficient, and the Tallest would be excruciatingly disappointed in his actions, perhaps to the point of forcing him before the Control Brains for an Existence Evaluation. But those realisations were pushed aside, forgotten about.

  Zim couldn’t bring himself to stop the sounds. He… liked the thrill it brought him, he _enjoyed_ what he felt. In fact, he’d never felt like how he felt in that moment, and for a second, that saddened him, as no other Irken had ever felt like how he did then, had never come to know that intensity that was brought by whatever it was Dib created.

  He shook his head. He should have discovered Dib’s secret practices on this noise box before, how had he not? Besides, if he could figure out why it affected him so much, then maybe, just maybe, he could use it against the human smeet and his species. Zim figured if it affected his _superior_ Irken mind, then it must affect humans somehow, and once he harnessed that audio power, then he’d rule the world and finally be able to present it to the Tallest.

  All too soon, Dib ended that final pattern of sounds and, satisfied with what he’d achieved within the dark confines of the lonely band room, started to shuffle his papers together and leave the room. Zim knew that this solitary lunchtime practice would come to an end, but within his chest he felt like it had been too short a time, too few patterns that were presented to his hearing organs. He felt like he deserved to hear more, just like he deserved to be an Invader and deserved to be praised for his work. It was like the sounds he heard were the cure to almost all of his mortal ailments.

  He resolved to follow Dib into the band room the next day, and Zim watched as Dib quickly slinked out of the room. The boy left Zim to follow quietly in his footsteps, like a hidden shadow.

 ---

The next day, Zim found himself just around the corner to the band room, waiting for Dib, a minute before the lunch bell rang, with no food in his hands. It was odd, he decided, that he was this invested in something he found so beautiful, even though he had heard those magical sounds in only one session. The little alien didn’t really know how long the human boy had been practicing, but as far as Zim was concerned, it didn’t matter.

  Eventually, Dib did show up, and, with a quick glance around, he slipped into the band room. Zim didn’t understand why Dib was so worried about someone hearing what he was doing on the grand noise box, it felt like it was one of the only nice things on that dirt ball planet. Why couldn’t the stupid human smeet share what he did with more than just himself willingly?

  Zim tore himself from his temporary annoyance at Dib. It didn’t matter if Dib wanted to share willingly, Zim had found a way to hear his sounds, and that was all that mattered for the time being.

  The door started to emanate sounds, though they were very stop and start, and Zim decided that it was then or never to slip inside unnoticed. He was sure that someone would eventually come down the hallway and spot Zim as he hovered around the ‘empty’ band room, and, when he looked back on what he’d learned about human society, doing something like secretly eavesdropping on someone else was weird.

  He put all of his stealth skills into that moment as he cracked the door open, flashed inside, then shut it again. He was rewarded with no outcry from Dib, and as the human continued to try and get his sounds right, Zim snuck into the spot he’d had the previous day. He wanted to try and be as comfortable as possible, after all, he was the one getting affected by those sounds.

  The sound box made a cacophony of terrible noises as Dib seemed to try and set everything up like it had been. His fingers darted across the ivory and ebony keys as they flew from one end of the surface to the other, and each sound got higher and higher. He then placed his hands right in the centre of the keys, and pressed down to hold one solid, full sound. It resonated with Zim, and the little alien found himself put a little bit at ease, though his conscious mind raised red flags at the notion.

  After a second, Dib released the sound, and let it settle around the room. He gave an audible sigh, and Zim gave a silent huff. Couldn’t the human just play already?

  Then, Dib shuffled his papers so that three were facing him, and began to rhythmically press the keys. Zim blinked. This didn’t sound quite like the other ones had. What was this? Something was being missed by the sounds, like there should have been another part to it, another set of hands to press the keys. Then Dib opened his mouth. For a millisecond, Zim thought Dib was about to interrupt the sounds with his obnoxious voice, but he surprised him. Instead, with his vocal addition, he filled what the noise box was missing.

  “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in. There’s an old man sitting next to me, making love to his tonic and gin.”

  Zim’s eyes widened as the sounds brought him a sense of loneliness and wistfulness, shocked that the human boy he liked to mock so much could actually produce such a good sound from his lips. Had he always had that ability? Perhaps not, Zim had always found him and his vocal chords annoying, maybe it was just due to the practicing.

  As the song went on, Zim felt a heavy weariness wash over him, as his long life dropped down onto his shoulders. He knew that feeling all too well, though it hadn’t come to him before on Earth. It was as though every syllable that cascaded from Dib’s mouth held a weight far heavier than just sound.

  Brought upon with a solo from the noise box and a grand finale, the sounds ended. Zim was captivated by every note, and he realised that he liked the sounds better when they had words going along with them. _Funny_ , he thought, _the Earth boy’s stupid, moronic voice can actually do something_ somewhat _better than whine. It’s a miracle!_

  After that thought, Zim zoned out.

 ---

Zim had sat in his safe little spot for an hour after Dib had already left before he realised that silence surrounded him. He panicked for a second, and feared that he’d been spotted, only to hear the bell as it rung, the only signal in the school telling human smeet babies to move from one class to another.

  He summoned a watch from his pack, which he had put in there only for proving to humans that he was an human Earth baby, (“Or else why would I have a watch in the first place?” he’d always ask), then almost screamed. He’d missed a whole class, zoned out and unresponsive in the band room. How had that happened?!

  With a quick diagnostic on his PAK and physical meat shell, Zim could conclude that nothing was actually wrong with him. Everything functioned like it should have, nothing was broken or tampered with. Then why, and more importantly _how_ , had he managed to completely block out Dib’s leaving of the room or the bell signaling the start of the next class? Was it the sounds he’d heard? What had happened? It was absolutely impossible for this to have happened, and yet…

  And yet, it had.

  With a huff, Zim stood up. In his mind, he tried to think of an excuse that would sound normal to humans so that he could get back into class, but it was no use; what had just happened was at the forefront of all his thoughts. He couldn’t just go back to class like a normal human. Besides, he was late then, and he’d disappeared at lunch, so hopefully, everyone thought he had just left.

  Zim’s attention was brought to the noise box Dib seemed to love. Zim noticed something, and moved forward to see that Dib had forgotten his papers. That was odd, had the boy been in a rush to leave? As he looked closer, Zim saw that there was some english on the papers. There was what he assumed to be a title at the top of one paper, which said ‘Elton John - Your Song’, and beside the title on the left was, in smaller print, ‘Piano and vocalist duet’. He frowned, and thought, _What’s a piano? What’s a duet?_

  His PAK whirred as he stored those questions to ask his base’s Computer, then turned his attention from the papers and the Vortian-like language that was written on them to the key surface.

  The keys seemed so plain up close, Zim thought. He wondered how something that looked so boring could possibly make such perfect sounds. With a want to find out, he reached out one of his fingers, and pressed a white key near to the middle of the surface. To his surprise, it made a single, solitary wave of sound, which he associated with the Dib-humans performances. It was wonderful, and sent chills of thrill throughout his body.

  Zim brought his hand back, thought for a second, then placed both hands on the black and white surface and sat down on the stool he’d seen Dib sit in. He felt an odd sense of confidence within him, though he supposed that feeling was normal, then pushed down on all the white keys that sat under his tri-fingered hands.

  With a wince, Zim immediately pulled back as the sound that was produced clawed at his hearing organs. It was harder to make good sounds that Zim thought. How had Dib done this?

  He figured that actually producing a nice sound on the noise box simply took time, which annoyed Zim. He didn’t _have_ the time to learn this! He frowned, then spaced his fingers on his right hand so that they were touching keys that weren’t right beside each other, which strained his hand uncomfortably, then tried pressing the keys once again. That time, the sounds that came out were better, and Zim hummed the sounds he heard. No wonder Dib looked so focused, his hands must constantly ache! Of course, Dib had more fingers to work with, so had more keys to stretch his hands over.

  A smile started to spread over Zim’s features as he put his left hand in the same spread-out position, then pressed both hands at the same time. He decided he liked that sound better, then moved his hands down the surface to another selection of white keys. The sounds that came from there were deeper, resonating more with Zim’s turmoil, and the alien decided he didn’t really like that as much. He then quickly moved the opposite way, and pressed a new set of white keys. They sounded more springy and joyful, almost like GIR was in the room.

  Zim then eyeballed the black keys, and moved one finger to press one of those. It sounded like one of the keys he’d already pressed, but it was off, sharper than what he’d heard before. With a grin, he decided he really liked the off-sounding noises, so he put his spaced fingers over a selection of those, and pressed down all at once, nodding when he heard their sounds.

  Then, Zim got an idea, and with a glint in his eye, he hovered a finger just above the farthest left key on the surface. With a quick press, he slid his finger down every single key until he hit the farthest on the right, then chuckled. It felt like a rainbow had assaulted his head, the sounds each giving way to the next in an almost perfect harmonic display. _Harmony_. That was a good word to describe these sounds. It was very-

   _RING, RING, RING!_

  Oh, right. Zim had forgotten that he was still simply in a classroom at school, even though it wasn’t his usual classroom. Did no one use the band room during the last classes of the day? Zim shook his head, ignoring his own question. He checked his watch again, then put it away. Those rings were the bell for the end of school, and with a huff, Zim tore himself from the noise box, annoyed that he wasn’t able to do more.

  He trudged home, looking at his hands with equal parts frustration and awe. He was frustrated that he hadn’t tried to replicate Dib’s sounds, but was awed that he had the potential to, that the sound box didn’t just recognize humans. He was also still confused. What was a piano? Had it something to do with the noise box he’d just touched?

  While Zim was deep in thought, his feet automatically brought him to his house, and he stepped inside, unaware of his surroundings. He was only snapped out of his questions by GIR, who had jumped up and down in front of him for a few seconds before he pushed a plate of _something_ into Zim’s face. He glanced quickly around the living room to see that GIR had torn through the room like a tornado, bits of that same _something_ all over everything.

  “Gah!” cried Zim, as he shoved the plate out of his face and onto the already messy floor. “GIR, what have you done to the base? And what is this? What do you insist to show the mighty _Zim_?”

  GIR giggled as his hands dropped. His cyan eyes squinted in the robot’s best attempt at a smile, then he squealed, “I made pudding!”

  Zim stared at the little robot, then muttered, “Yes, so you did…”

  He then shook his head, puffed out his chest, and yelled, “COMPUTER! I have some questions! Also, clean up this mess, and make GIR another bath! I will not have another ‘potato’ incident!”

  The house shook at the mention of the ‘potato’ incident, in which GIR had grown potatoes that had come to sentience by touching some of Zim’s radioactive ship fuel and started a revolution against the alien, so it immediately got to work. Once some of the mess was cleaned up, the Computer’s bored, flat voice spoke from the wires in the ceiling.

  “What questions do you have?”

  Zim looked up at the ceiling, then moved to sit on the couch as he asked, “Computer, what is a ‘piano’? And if it’s something that has a picture, I demand to see it!”

  The Computer sighed, and the tv before Zim shifted from a black screen to static as the Computer tried to bring up a picture. It took a few minutes, and with Zim’s short patience, the Computer had to call him back to the living room from the kitchen when it had finally brought up something.

  When he looked at the screen, Zim gasped. “I know what that is! That’s that noise box that Dib loves to make sounds on.” Then Zim frowned. “But I asked you for a piano, Computer, not a noise box. Are your command receptors malfunctioning again?”

  “No, Zim, my command receptors are just as barely functioning as you had left them the last time you tried to fix them. This… ahem, ‘ _noise box_ ’ is what a piano is. Do you want details on it or are you satisfied?”

  “Tell me about it!” Zim commanded.

  “Right, I should have guessed you’d want to know more,” the Computer drawled. “It’s what is known as an ‘instrument’, which makes sounds called ‘music’. A piano, specifically, is both in the category of ‘string’ and ‘percussion’ instrument.”

  Zim frowned. “Well, Computer? What is an ‘instrument’? Tell me more!”

  The Computer knew it wouldn’t be able to stop Zim from asking more questions, so instead sighed once more and resigned to it’s fate, explaining as much as it could. Zim’s questions spiraled from simply ‘What is music?’ to ‘What are sub-genres?’, ‘Why is music so huge?’ and ‘Why do humans need to hear?’.

 ---

It took one full week for Zim to run out of what he considered his most pressing questions about ‘music’ and ‘pianos’, but eventually, the little green alien stopped asking.

  The Computer had just finished its explanation about why some birds made songs that sounded like human songs, and was silent for a minute, when it asked, “Well?”

  “Well what?” Zim asked back, as his legs dangled off of the couch arm.

  “Well, aren’t you going to ask something else mildly related to what I just said?” the Computer asked, and waited once again with the full expectation of Zim launching into another question tyrade.

  Instead, Zim just sat on the arm of the couch, more silent than he’d ever been. Finally, he sprung up, and announced, “I must find the Dib and demand to know how he ever managed to create this… this _music_ so effortlessly in that room I found him in!”

  “You know, I could just tell you,” the Computered intoned, but Zim was already in his disguise and out the door, geared up to find and face Dib like he had so many times before.

  GIR looked up at the ceiling to where he supposed the Computer was, a small, dopey smile practically dripping off his face, then casually commented, “You sure know a whole lot about _stuff_ , Mr. Computer Voice! I wish I knew as much as you, then maybe I could make me the best sammich in the world!”

  The Computer didn’t respond.

 ---

As Zim ran to school, holding his wig in place so it didn’t fall off, he realised he’d dug himself into a hole. It was not very often that he realised this, but he knew that he’d gotten himself very deep unintentionally. How had this ‘music’ overtaken his life so quickly?

  He almost ran into other students when he reached the school, his mind wandering separate from his body. A tiny section of his brain registered that it was just before school, when all the students were wandering around in front of the building itself, but the thought was brushed away. He then promptly face-planted into one kid, and both of them tumbled to the ground. Frustrated, Zim jumped back up, just about to spout a withering monologue until he actually saw who he had bumped into.

  “Ow, urgh, what the heck, Zim?” Dib groaned from the ground as he rubbed his back with a hand. “What’s with the rush? Wait, are you doing… _something_? What are you planning, space boy?! I demand to know!”

  Dib pushed himself up into his own two legs, an accusatory glare on his face, but Zim’s mind spun ten kilometres per second. It had been Dib he’d seen, right? It wasn’t some other kid that looked sort of like Dib… right? His voice sounded so much more different then than when he’d sung. Sung? The Computer had said something about singing in relation to a human’s voice box, he thought that was the right word. What about his hands? Zim glanced down at Dib’s hands. They seemed right, small and quick, but still able to span over a number of ‘piano keys’. Could it have been someone who was _not_ Dib? Why was the alien doubting himself all of a sudden?

  Dib opened his mouth, about to try and grab Zim’s obviously diminished focus, but Zim beat him to the punch and burst out with a question. “You’ve been playing piano secretly in the band room for the past two months, right?”

  Every kid within earshot turned around to look at Zim and Dib, the latter of which started to stutter, a red blush spread across his features. Their eyes bore into the pair, like a huge pack of wild dogs, and whatever activity they had participated in was dropped to the ground without a second thought.

  “I-I d-don’t know wh-what you m-mean, Zim, I-I… n-no?” Dib choked out. His eyes darted everywhere but Zim, on the watch for even the slightest of movements from the students around him.

  Zim frowned. This was stupid, why was Dib suddenly so weak-looking? Was that a normal reaction when someone asked another if they played and instrument of such caliber as a piano? And why had everyone turned to look? It wasn’t like it was any of their business what he and the Dib-stink were talking about.

  “You LIE!” Zim screeched, and Dib’s eyes snapped onto him, a look of pure terror within them.

  From behind Zim, he heard someone snicker, and immediately, Zim whipped around to face them. “What do you find so funny? Huh? Huh?! This is a serious question; so serious, in fact, that your puny human mind couldn’t possibly understand just how _serious_ it is!”

  Zim heard someone else’s footsteps running away from him in the opposite direction than he faced, and he glanced over his shoulder to see that Dib had fled the scene and was headed into the school building, a chorus of mean-spirited chuckles in his wake. Zim growled, then groaned loud and clear as the bell for first period went off. Why wasn’t _anything_ going in his favour?! This had to be the worst execution of a plan ever, and Zim knew just how terribly his plans had gone before.

  A mass of bodies shuffled through the school halls as everyone tried to get to their first period classes on time. Zim pushed through the throng in a feeble attempt to catch up with Dib and ask his very important question. He fell into his normal first period, Ms. Bitters class, but with a quick look around, he saw no sign of Dib.

  Even so, the late bell rang out, and the door snapped shut behind Zim, making him yelp. The shadow that was Ms. Bitters moved silently to her desk, just as the thud of the unfortunately late children smacked against the door, unable to get in and once again lost within the chaos that was the hallways at that time.

  “Sit down, everyone,” hissed Ms. Bitters, “and prepare for a lesson in the inevitability of death to everything in all of the millions upon billions of multiverses.”

  Disheartened, Zim sat at his desk, which was the closest to the door, put his head in his hand with his elbow on the desk, and sighed. He just needed to make it to second period, then maybe he could find Dib again.

  After what felt like an _eternity_ , the second period bell rang, and Zim immediately zipped from his chair to the door, which opened effortlessly in his grasp. Determined to find Dib before the horde of children swarmed from their classes, Zim ran to the band room, hoping that he could wait out the bell in there.

  He approached the door, but saw it was cracked open slightly. With a small push, he opened the door a little bit more, then peeked into the room. Within the usual light from the small bendy lamp, Zim saw the figure of Dib at the piano, his head down and the room silent. Papers with the Vortian-looking language - sheet music, he then knew - scattered the floor. Dib didn’t move, so neither did Zim, and for a while, the pair was stuck in stasis.

  Zim felt the rumble of the horde as it came thundering down the hallways, racing for the next class, and he was forced to creep into the quiet band room and close the door fully, lest he be knocked down by the mindless stampede.

  It was eerie, standing in such a silent room with Dib, whether the human was aware of his presence or not. There was something that chilled Zim to his very core when the only sounds that he could hear were the ringing in his head and the sound of another’s breath. With a pit in his squeedlyspooch, Zim cleared his throat, which made the human boy’s head snap up to look at him.

  Dib’s amber eyes were normally so magnified by his thick prescription glasses that a lot of the time, Zim couldn't actually tell if his eyes were widened in shocked, fear, or something else. Though at first it had unnerved him, Zim had grown accustomed to the human boy’s huge, round glasses, and how they made him look like he was studying every tiny action Zim made. They had made the alien wonder, however, if Dib slept with them on, as he’d never seen him without those huge frames on his face.

  That was, until right then.

  Dib’s eyes didn't actually look at Zim, rather, they looked in the general direction of where Zim was. The alien was taken by how small and _normal_ Dib’s eyes actually looked without twelve centimetres of shaped glass overtop of them, and by just how blind Dib was without his lenses. Zim had heard the human phrase ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’, and while Zim still didn't truly understand what a ‘soul’ was, he could grasp what the phrase meant, and in the heat of that moment, he understood all too well.

  “Who’s there?” Dib quietly called out as he fumbled for something on the piano. Zim could only assume he was reaching for his glasses, and hastened to speak before the boy could snark at him with his glasses on.

  “Er…” Zim eloquently managed. He hated the fact that he was being so soft with his enemy, though he tried to defend his own actions with the want of answers and music.

  Dib frowned, and his hands knocked his glasses to the floor. With a swear, Dib slid off the stool he was upon and started blindly searching the floor for his lost spectacles. Zim grinned a little bit to himself as he watched Dib bumble around, swears and mutters drifting over from the boy. He much preferred watching Dib fail, rather than chase him around for answers.

  A minute went by, and finally Dib triumphantly stood up from the floor, his glasses upon the bridge of his nose once more. He then focused on the only other person in the room, and his winning grin was instantly thrown out the window in favour of a disgusted grimace.

  “Oh, Zim. What do you want? Come to mock me some more because I play piano? ‘Oooh, Dib’s such a _loser_ because he’s not in sports, just sitting in a dark room teaching himself music! What a sucker!’ If that's all you’re here for than you might as well leave. Maybe tell the teacher I won't be in for the rest of the week.”

  A frown took over Zim’s face, and he replied, “Today’s Thursday, and tomorrow’s a teacher’s day. Besides, I would never stoop so low as to help you skip classes.”

  Dib screwed up his face, his glasses almost falling off again. “Fine, then I won't be coming in on Monday, and the teachers will just have to deal. Look, just leave me alone, Zim. I’m not in the mood to deal with you and your… whatever it was that you’re planning.”

  Determination settled over Zim as he rooted himself into his spot just inside the door, and confidently announced, “No, I'm not leaving, and there’s nothing you can do about that, Dib-thing.”

  Dib groaned.

  Zim moved forward into the room, and stood beside the piano, oblivious to Dib’s attempts to shoo him off without saying anything. “I have questions and I demand you answer them!”

  With a hand on his forehead, Dib carefully tried to ease the growing headache he started to feel every time he talked with Zim, though he realised his attempts were for naught, then sighed, “Whatever, yeah, what's your question?”

  “‘Question _s_ ’, plural,” Zim corrected smugly, “I've got more than one. Number one,” he put up a hand, holding one finger up for Dib to see, “how do you create this _music_? What do you do with your hands?”

  “That's two, dummy,” Dib retorted, a sly smile on his face as he looked up at Zim, “you can’t have two things in the ‘number one’ spot. Which one is ‘number one’, and which is ‘number two’?”

  “Fine then,” Zim growled, and Dib chuckled. “Two, what do you do with your hands? If you give me an incorrect answer then I will feed your large intestine to the little piggy farm GIR has started in the bottom levels of my base.”

  “You don't even know what a large intestine is,” Dib muttered as he looked down at the piano keyboard. He stretched his fingers for a second, watching as they splayed out over the keys, then puffed out a breath. “Anyways, do you at least know what these keys do?”

  “ _Yes_ ,” Zim huffed, offended, “I pressed some when you left the other day. It was very entertaining-”

  “You were _spying on me_ while I played piano during lunch?!” Dib screeched. Zim winced at the sudden sound. “How many times have you done this? Why were you doing this? _What is wrong with you, Zim?!_ You don’t just _listen_ to someone play something when they don’t want anyone to hear!”

  The alien rolled his eyes. “I only heard you play twice. The first time was an accident, but I _was_ looking for you, so I guess it was also on purpose. Actually, it _was_ on purpose, everything the amazing _Zim_ does is one purpose, ignore what I was just saying! Anyways… your, um, playing, interested me, so I came back yesterday, and now here we are.”

  Dib looked aghast at the notion that Zim had heard him play, but Zim didn't really know what was wrong. Besides, the sounds gripped Zim like nothing had before, so of course he came back a second time. What would a normal person do, if not that?

  “ _Urgh_ ,” Dib groaned as he placed his forehead on the piano keys.

  His head made an awful sound on the instrument, and Zim put his hands over where his hearing organs were as he tried to escape the horrid noise. Just for extra measure, the alien scrunched up his face and bent inwards, to little avail.

  When Dib finally released the dreadful keys, Zim unbent himself and glared daggers at the boy. “What was that for? You could have rendered me deaf, you stinking monkey smeet!”

  Confused, Dib turned to look at Zim, then quietly said, “That wasn’t even all that loud.”

  “Yeah, well, it _was_ loud, and annoying, and I didn’t like it all that much,” Zim sniffed, “play something nice if you’re gonna touch those keys, or just don’t touch them at all, it hurts my squeedlyspooch.”

  Dib snorted, then asked, “That hurt your… whatever-it’s-called? Seriously? Man, you must really be sensitive to sounds, or something. Hey wait, I just thought of something. If you’re so sensitive to sounds, you couldn’t have heard me play twice in a row, because you would have tried to stop me, or at the very least tried to kill me with my- er, _the_ piano, or something. What’s with the lack of attack?”

  Zim frowned and crossed his arms. “I, er, well… I don’t know, I just liked what I heard. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, show me how you make this ‘music’!”

  “Uh-huh,” Dib hummed as he nodded his head slowly, “right, sure. Haven’t you, you know, creepily _watched_ me play for two days? Shouldn’t you have at least gotten a clue as to how it works by now?”

  Zim blinked, and Dib sighed. “Here, I’m going to play a simple song that every Earth child in America knows the name of, and you’ve gotta watch my hands. That’ll hopefully show you how music is made on this particular instrument, and then I won’t have to teach you anything because you’ll be _out of my hair_ , got it?”

  Before Zim could respond, Dib started to play. Zim was taken by the soothing notes, and slowly, the little alien started to feel tired. His eyelids drooped, and his body hunched over, as though he were exhausted. Dib finished his small piece, then turned to Zim.

  With a small gasp, Dib muttered, “You’re affected by the sound… that’s crazy! If I were to just play something soothing, then I could take you at your weakest and prove to the world that I really am not insane!”

  Zim snapped out of his temporary tiredness, and once again glared at Dib. “Don’t you dare even think about trying that, _Dib-thing_ , or I will destroy you and everything you know and love!”

  Confused, Dib murmured, “But you’re going to do that anyways…”

  With a huff, Zim turned away with his arms crossed, annoyed. “You didn’t even answer my question, you idiot, you have to use _words_ , not that you and your primitive grunting language could understand the true meaning of speaking.”

  Dib snorted. “You realise you’re using English, too, right? I’ve been able to understand you this whole time, and unless you’ve used some ‘high-tech alien thing’, I doubt you managed to learn English within the first day of being on the planet.”

  A growl came from Zim, then he retorted, “Of _course_ it’s not a high-tech thing, it’s a simple translator. What, are you humans seriously not evolved enough to create a translator so you can understand the languages of races you’ve never met before?”

  “We don’t go off-planet, in case you’ve forgotten,” Dib chuckled, which made Zim resort to the death glare. “We’re still working on getting to our own moon without incident.”

  “That just proves my point,” snarled Zim, “you _humans_ are pathetic, with your terrible technology and horrendous… faces! No wonder no one else has tried to invade you yet, you’re too pathetic to invade!”

  Dib laughed, and Zim pushed him off the stool, which sent Dib sprawling. A loud clicking made Zim suspect that Dib’s glasses had fallen off of the boy’s face, and the string of strong curses that quickly came from Dib confirmed his suspicion. Feeling victorious, Zim grinned, and listened as Dib muttered something about going to get his glasses tightened.

  After a couple more minutes of Zim simply watching as Dib once again searched for his lenses, Dib put a hand on the seat of the stool and stood up, his glasses securely on his face once more. He scowled at Zim and the alien just shrugged, a grin stuck on his face.

  “You’re a jerk,” the boy accused, then sat down once more.

  With a huff, Zim crossed his arms again, then stared down Dib. Finally, he declared, “I’m going to take over this scumball of a planet, I’m going to wipe out all life here and present it to my Tallest as a gift so that I can become the greatest Invader in history, and I’m going to do that all with a victorious grin on my face because I am ZIM, and I am _great_ , but I’ve found that out of all the _disgusting_ things on this planet, you worthless humans have managed to make something actually somewhat worthy of my glorious Zim time. This thing, which you call ‘music’, is something that will outlive you and something that I will show the rest of Irk because it is just _barely_ worthy of being heard by the superior Irken race. This being, I demand that you, _Dib-thing_ , teach me how to play this instrument, so I can become the master of this, along with everything else. Teach this to me!”

  Dib had to put both hands over his mouth to prevent himself from outright laughing as Zim’s monologue came to an end, and, when his chuckles had died down, he dropped his hands and puffed out, “You’re really stunned, Zim, you just don’t get that you’re never going to win! I’m gonna stop you from taking my planet and killing my people, just you wait!”

  “You can’t stop the Armada,” Zim proudly declared, “the Empire will come and you will have zero control over the situation! Now, teach me this ‘piano’, and maybe I’ll have slightly more mercy on you when your time has come!”

  Dib sighed, putting a hand over his mouth to hide his grin, then said, “Tell you what. If you wanna learn so much, come back here tomorrow at lunch, and I’ll show you some of the basics. That way, it’ll essentially be a truce between us, for a bit. It’s really not that hard to learn, I’ve been teaching myself piano for a while now. It just takes some getting used to. But after you’ve learned enough to teach yourself as much as you want, then things go back to normal, and the game is back on, okay?”

  Zim nodded, much to Dib’s relief, but then frowned. “What’s a ‘truce’?”

  “Seriously, Zim?” Dib scoffed.

  The alien just stared blankly at Dib, and the human huffed, then launched into an over-complex explanation of the origins and meaning of the word ‘truce’, though Zim was pretty sure that some of the things Dib explained were made up.

 ---

Several months later, Zim was on call with the Tallest, a huge grand piano taking up much of the camera frame. The Tallest looked bored as Zim tried his best to replicate what Dib had shown him, though his lack of practice and actual song made his sounds messy, and unable to convey the same emotion that the human boy had been able to create.

  Eventually, Tallest Red had had enough. “Zim, while I… _appreciate_ that you’ve tried to give us a, um, show, I, frankly, find the noises your forcing into my hearing organs are just simply unpleasant, and I’m sure that my co-leader here can agree with me that we’d like to now cut off this transmission, okay?”

  “No, wait, my Tallest!” cried Zim, as he lifted his hands from the piano. “This human _music_ thing is actually, er, interesting! It would be a shame to lose it when the Armada comes to complete the invasion! If you would just give me a few more moments, I promise you-”

  “Yes, yes, we know, Zim,” Tallest Purple interrupted, “but we’ve already given you precious minutes that we could be using to snack and blow up stuff. I think that it’s time to let go of trying this… whatever it is you’re doing, and let us get back to what is really important here!”

  Tallest Red nodded sagely. “Yes, I think it is time to end the transmission. _Goodbye_ , Zim.”

  “N-no, wait,” Zim yelled, in an attempt to keep them on longer, “my Tallest!”

  But the screen went blue as the image of the Tallest in the Massive disappeared, and the Irken text for ‘End of Transmission’ flashed before letting the room fall into darkness.

  Zim sat for a solid twenty minutes before he looked back at his grand piano, then muttered, “Computer, turn on the lights. I can’t see anything, why was the room dark in the first place?”

  As the overhead lights flickered to life, Zim struck a few chords, then grit his teeth. He stood violently up from his seat, knocking over the small human invention, and banged the piano keyboard, regretting it instantly by the shocking sound.

  “Computer! Send a transmission to the Dib-beast, I must tell him that our practices are not over, and that if he cannot _properly_ teach me how to play this infernal instrument, I will be forced to break our truce and rain horrible doom down upon him!”

  The Computer sighed, feeling very put upon, though followed Zim’s command anyways.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, dear reader, for reading this short story! I hope you enjoyed it, and maybe comment down below on how I could better improve my writing, or just tell me what your favourite part was. The songs I had in mind, in order, were: Turkish March by Mozart, Ave Maria by Schubert, Fires of a Revolution by Lionel Yu, Piano Man by Billy Joel, Your Song by Elton John, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.


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